The Weight of Words
There's a very interesting article in the Guardian book blog at the moment, discussing the pricing of ebooks compared to traditionally published books. It's very interesting and well worth checking out. I found the cost difference between publishing a paperback compared to a high quality hardcover to be extremely surprising. And of course, with the sea change in the way consumers have access to books now that epublishing has taken off exponentially, makes it all the more fascinating. Because ebooks cost so little to produce and distribute than physical editions, should you pay considerably less for the electronic book? Or are you actually paying for the content - for the hours and hours of hard work and imagination that the writer put into their story? Frankly, if it was just about production costs you'd have to virtually give all ebooks away. But that isn't the point, is it? It's the content you're really buying, just as with an MP3 that contains a musician...